Build from Source

Install Robusta from source to develop new features for the Robusta Engine (robusta-runner).

To install Robusta as a user, follow Monitor Kubernetes from Scratch instead.

To develop new playbook actions, you don't need to install from source. Refer to Developing New Actions.

Use Mirrord to build and test Robusta on your local machine:

  1. Install Robusta normally with Helm

  2. Clone Robusta's source code: git clone https://github.com/robusta-dev/robusta.git && cd robusta

  3. Run Robusta via Mirrord ./run_runner_locally.sh and follow the instructions in your terminal.

Developing Playbooks Locally

  1. Run Robusta with Mirrord, as described above

  2. Add a local playbooks directory to deployment/playbooks/active_playbooks.yaml:

# this example shows how to locally develop https://github.com/robusta-dev/kubernetes-chatgpt-bot
playbook_repos:
  chatgpt_robusta_actions:
    url: "file:///path/to/kubernetes-chatgpt-bot"

  1. To apply changes to your playbook without restarting Robusta, simply run: touch deployment/playbooks/active_playbooks.yaml.

Common Errors

This error occurs on macOS devices with Apple Silicon. It's related to security restrictions on multi-threading involving fork() in Python.

Solution:

To resolve this issue, set the following environment variable in your project's environment variables:

OBJC_DISABLE_INITIALIZE_FORK_SAFETY=YES

Setting the Environment Variable in IDEs:

  • PyCharm:

    In PyCharm, go to 'Run' -> 'Edit Configurations', then find your project's configuration. Under 'Environment variables', add: OBJC_DISABLE_INITIALIZE_FORK_SAFETY=YES.

  • VSCode:

    In VSCode, modify your .vscode/launch.json file by adding the following line to your configuration settings: "env": {"OBJC_DISABLE_INITIALIZE_FORK_SAFETY": "YES"}.

Occurs on Mac OS if dependencies are missing. Run brew install libjpeg.

Sometimes, when attaching a debugger to Robusta the following error occurs: NotADirectoryError: [Errno 20] Not a directory

If this occurs, disable the Attach to subprocess option on your debugger.

Using Skaffold (Alternative to Using Mirrord)

Instead of running Robusta locally with Mirrord, you can test Robusta inside a Kubernetes cluster using Skaffold:

  1. git clone the source code.

  2. Install skaffold and helm

  3. Run helm repo add prometheus-community https://prometheus-community.github.io/helm-charts

  4. Run robusta gen-config and copy the result to deployment/generated_values.yaml

  5. Run skaffold run --tail. On M1 Macs, add -p apple-m1-dev

Alert Simulation

To simulate a Prometheus alerts and cause relevant playbooks to run:

poetry run robusta demo-alert --alert=Test123 --labels=label1=123,label2=abc

If running multiple times in a row, change a label value each time so that AlertManager doesn't supress retransmissions.

CLI Development

To develop the robusta cli:

  1. git clone the source code

  2. poetry install

  3. poetry run robusta

Alternative method, using pip not poetry

Install the robusta cli into your global python environment:

  1. git clone the source code

  2. pip3 install .

Running Tests

See tests/README.md